jnrivasseau

Agree with Paras there, VWO was not a follower, they started at the same time. These things are actually funny - I even started Kameleoon before Optimizely (early 2008), but we developed our visual editor first and did not apply it to AB testing at the beginning. We made a (successful) pivot at the end of 2011 and have been focusing on CRO since, becoming competitors to Optimizely & others.

Calling Optimizely's competitors simple followers is clearly an over-simplification and a bias from the VC/SF crow indeed. As Paras pointed out, every actor in the field had their firsts in the market (some of Kameleoon's examples: our anti-flickering technology, our aggregation features in our reports / data engine, our automatic cross-device history reconciliation or our full ITP support). In many ways, Optimizely tech is now trailing behind today.

However it's true that Optimizely (and to a lesser measure, VWO) did a lot from the marketing side to develop the market, and we benefited quite a bit from that. We're definitely grateful to them :)

Kameleoon (disclosure: I am the CTO & founder). Close to Optimizely in the sense that it has enterprise level features. Our main focus at Kameleoon is performance / speed, at every level (loading of the JS engine, DOM manipulation, tracking, server side testing and/or feature flagging). But there are lots of other alternatives as well. As always, it depends on what exactly you need :-)

Hello, Jean-Noel here, from Kameleoon (also a competitor to Optimizely, but mostly serving European markets so far). First off, congrats to Optimizely / Dan and co for the acquisition. For us Optimizely has always been a role model, especially from the technical side of things (I'm the founder of Kameleoon, but currently serving as CTO, so obviously I have a tech background). Optimizely was (and still is, in many ways) a great platform. And it did create (or at least, heavily helped develop) a whole market. However I agree with Feynman's comment, the main problem with this company (and even looking from aside, it was quite obvious for us) was that they raised way too much money and made promises to their investors that were completely impossible to fulfill. Basically, it looked like they wanted to be compared to AirBNB, but their potential was honestly never the same, and this was quite clear from someone with a little insight into the business. Because of that, they started making mistakes after mistakes, burned way too much money and it all went downhill.

They're not the only ones with that problem - almost all competitors / actors in the field raised too much for the side of the market, from my opinion. Dynamic Yield is probably the one that did the best at that game, with a great exit when the hype was at its peak. But all the other ones are clearly in trouble (even Optimizely exit, I am sure, is clearly not a success for their investors, etc). The only actor that has a reasonable overall strategy is VWO (somebody asked if they're were profitable - of course they are, since they did not receive any funding, they have to. While Optimizely clearly never was), because it stayed lean and avoided the pitfalls of over investments (going to all continents on the planet, having 20 offices all over the world, etc). Hats off to Paras for that. We try to stick to the same strategy at Kameleoon, even if we had to raise a bit of capital. But you don't need to raise $200 millions to have a great CRO platform - we proved this for a fact.

About the switch to Enterprise - anyone in this industry will tell you it was absolutely necessary. Impossible to sell experimentation to SMB and expect to be profitable, you need larger customers. Because contrarily to Mailchimp for instance, a SMB customer paying $50 (or even $500) per month for a CRO platform won't be able to operate it on its own and will churn. The problem with Optimizely pivot to Enterprise is not the pivot in itself, it's how they did it (I heard some horrors stories from people inside Optimizely, not sure if they are true, but one thing is clear - it did not go well).

Anyway, it's still an exciting field, from the technical side of things, there are still many innovations to be done and we hope to spearhead that at Kameleoon :-)